One of the worst places for on-the-job spying against employees is The New York Times, says a report.

Wired magazine compiled the best and worst workplaces for privacy among employees and singled out The Times – often regarded as a champion of civil liberties – as having too many prying eyes looking over workers’ shoulders.

The best place for employee privacy, Wired said, is IBM, which takes unusual steps to protect employee privacy, even forcing health care partners to eliminate employee Social Security numbers as patient identifiers.

Fear of office snooping has reached near-epidemic levels. Computers have allowed companies to spy on workers with great ease because of the e-mail and electronic footprints left at workstations.

One company, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, even demanded genetic testing of employees to shoot down their workers’ compensation claims. (It backed off after losing a lawsuit.)

But some human resources departments routinely use keystroke monitoring, e-mail surveillance and Internet tracking to determine what you’re doing at the computer. “On-the-job spying has never been more common, or more effective,” Wired said.

One company notorious for spying on workers is Wal-Mart, which since 1999 has lost three lawsuits for improper search and seizure. And Eli Lilly “freaked after 9/11” and started doing background checks on anyone it ever did business with, said Wired. Full-time employees got an “even more stringent” background grilling.

At the Times, a staff physician sued, claiming she was fired for refusing to report on employee medical conditions. The Times claimed doctors couldn’t be bound by patient confidentiality and won the case.

Wired said employees can rest easy about privacy at firms such as Ford, Hewlett-Packard, Sears and Baxter International – all of which have progressive policies to prevent intrusions into employees’ private lives.